seeds, fancy poultry,
fighting bantams and objects _de vertu_.... You are foreigners, are you
not? How barbarous Spain, what people, what dirt, what lack of culture,
what impoliteness, what lack of energy!"

The universal agent choked, coughed, spat, produced a handkerchief of
crimson silk with which he wiped his eyes and mouth, twirled his
moustaches and plunged again into a torrent of words, turning on
Telemachus from time to time little red-rimmed eyes full of moist
pathos like a dog's.

"Oh there are times, gentlemen, when it is too much to bear, when I
rejoice to think that it's all up with my lungs and that I shan't live
long anyway.... In America I should have been a Rockefeller, a
Carnegie, a Morgan. I know it, for I am a man of genius. It is true. I
am a man of genius.... And look at me here walking from one of these
cursed tumbledown villages to another because I have not money enough
to hire a cab.... And ill too, dying of consumption! O Spain, Spain,
how do you crush your great men! What you must think of us, you who
come from civilized countries, where life is organized, where commerce
is a gentlemanly, even a noble occupation...."

"But you savor life more...."

"_Ca, ca_," interrupted the universal agent with a downward gesture of
the hand. "To think that they call by the same name living here in a
pen like a pig and living in Paris, London, New York, Biarritz,
Trouville ... luxurious beds, coiffures, toilettes, theatrical
functions, sumptuous automobiles, elegant ladies glittering with
diamonds ... the world of light and enchantment! Oh to think of it! And
Spain could be the richest country in Europe, if we had energy,
organization, culture! Think of the exports: iron, coal, copper,
silver, oranges, hides, mules, olives, food products, woolens, cotton
cloth, sugarcane, raw cotton ... couplets, dancers, gipsy girls...."

The universal agent had quite lost his breath. He coughed for a long
time into his crimson handkerchief, then looked about him over the
rolling dun slopes to which the young grain sprouting gave a sheen of
vivid green like the patina on a Pompeian bronze vase, and shrugged his
shoulders.

"_!Que vida!_ What a life!"

For some time a spire had been poking up into the sky at the road's
end; now yellow-tiled roofs were just visible humped out of the
wheatland, with the church standing guard over them, it's buttresses as
bowed as the legs of a bulldog. At the sight of the village a